


Slow Spiral

by tuppenny



Category: Newsies!: the Musical - Fierstein/Menken
Genre: Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Eating Disorders, F/M, rating it Teen for I think there's one curse word and for the eating disorder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-26
Updated: 2017-10-26
Packaged: 2019-01-23 08:28:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12503188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tuppenny/pseuds/tuppenny
Summary: In which Katherine's assessments of herself cannot be trusted





	Slow Spiral

It’s a slow spiral downwards, and by the time she notices and recognizes it for what it is, it’s been going on too long for her to stop. She hadn’t meant for it to happen; she hadn’t had the time or energy to plan something like this even if she’d wanted to. Her editor is running her ragged, she’s constantly dashing from one borough to the next, chasing down interviews, downing cup after cup of coffee to finish under the deadline, and by the time she gets home at night it’s all she can do to have a piece of toast, shower, and flop into bed. Sometimes next to her husband, sometimes not. Newspaper life keeps both of them on their toes, which they need—too much down time makes them both snappish. 

But there is a limit to busyness, and Katherine’s getting dangerously close to toppling over the edge of that cliff. At this point it’s been several consecutive weeks of struggling to finish things on time, frantically typing up reports, coming back late at night and heading out again as soon as she can drag herself out of bed. She keeps at it, because she knows that the higher-ups are testing her mettle to see if she’s worthy of a promotion (they need to know if she can overcome her genetic handicap of having been born a woman), and if she can just outlast them then she’ll finally have the seniority she needs to snag the stories she’s actually interested in writing. So all of this is worth it. It _is_.

Practically speaking, though, ‘all of this’ involves sixteen-hour days, a hermitlike existence, and so little time with her husband that she’s almost forgotten what it feels like to spend a quiet Sunday afternoon with him. She used to curl up against him as he read the paper from back to front and she read it from front to back, trading sections as they finished. But ‘all of this’ leaves no time for that.

‘All of this’ is forcing her to become self-sufficient, self-reliant, self-contained.

And she isn’t handling it well.

It takes him longer to notice than it does her. That in itself speaks to how off-kilter their relationship is these days; with his artist’s eye, he’s the one with a talent for noticing her physical cues, the one who’s attuned to spotting her small changes. He’s almost always the one to see the tension in her muscles and remind her, ever so gently, that she hasn’t moved in an hour and she ought to stretch, that she can’t live on coffee alone, that she seems worried and he’s here to listen. But they’ve been passing like ships in the night for so long now that he feels as if he never sees her long enough to notice anything about her. These days, their moments together are swift and stolen, almost like the way they were during the uncertain and heady days of the strike. And because both of them know that each moment they share with each other is nearly over as soon as it’s begun, they focus on using that time just to be. To breathe. Smile. Sigh. Touch. _Connect_. Which is all well and good, but it means that neither of them has any time to truly see the other as they _are_ instead of as they _were_.

There are little clues, of course; breadcrumbs scattered throughout the forest that would guide them home if only they had the presence of mind to gather them up before birds pick the pathway clean. Offers to meet for lunch are rebuffed with “I really don’t have time to sit for lunch today, I’ll just eat something on the go,” and offers to make enough dinner for leftovers receive an “Oh, that’s sweet of you, but I’ll be home so late that it’s probably just best if I pick something up on the way back.” He’s vaguely aware of the fact that there are never any signs that she _did_ pick something up on the way back, but maybe she ate at a restaurant. Maybe she ate on the walk home. 

It doesn’t cross his mind that maybe she didn’t eat at all.

It doesn’t cross hers, either. At least not until she’s already a month in to coffee for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, the occasional piece of fruit as she sprints from one interview to the next, and more coffee for dinner. It feels routine now, like something she’s always done, like something permanent, and even though she knows that other people tend to eat more food and more frequently than she does, she’s sure she’s within the bounds of normal. Her routine is working, after all—she’s getting the stories written, she’s gained approving nods from her editor, she’s feeling more focused than ever. She’s so close to this promotion that she can almost touch it. She can almost taste it. And that’s all the nourishment she needs. 

She’s so convinced that she’s fine that she brushes off the dizzy spells as a product of the summer heat, the headaches as the result of too little sleep. And oftentimes her body rebels when she eats now, leaving her rushing for the nearest public restroom, stalls so covered in filth that she feels almost as sick coming out as she did going in. It makes her wish she’d never eaten anything to begin with, and soon that wish becomes an internal command. She feels better for a while, relieved that she no longer needs to use the rank outhouses that pepper the slums.

She feels better for a while, but then she feels worse.

It takes an offhand comment from someone at the office for her to realize what she’s doing to herself, some crack about how she used to be so fashionable and now her clothes are hanging off her like ragpicker’s leavings. She bristles, but then, pressing her hands to her stomach, she realizes he’s right. She’d so enjoyed not feeling confined by her clothing that she hadn’t thought about _why_ she no longer felt its constant pressure against her ribs. But now she knows.

And she’s proud.

It’s a perverse pride, and she’s self-aware enough to know that, but she’s always drawn pleasure from being willful and contrary. Being proud of something that everyone says she ought to find shameful and sobering is second nature to her. She’s proud that she’s a journalist, she’s proud that she doesn’t have children even though she’s midway through her twenties, she’s proud that she stuck to her guns and married the love of her life despite the objections of her family. And now she’s proud of this. It feels right, somehow; it’s just another thing in a series of unconventional things, isn’t it? Unconventional as sin and stubborn to the core—that’s who she is. She doesn’t let herself dwell on the fact that those other things _are_ things to be proud of, societal norms be damned, whereas _this_? This is harmful. This needs fixing.

She’s not going to fix it, though. She dismissed that idea as soon as she had it. She’s trying to plug too many other holes in the world to have time to handle this one, and besides, this is one hole –maybe the only hole in all of this rotten, stinking city– that no one has asked her to fill. So she’s going to wait. She’s going to wait until someone else notices. She’s going to wait until someone else sees that she’s slipping, ever so slowly, into the pit she’s digging for herself. She’s going to wait until someone else forces her to shovel the dirt back in and fight her way up to the surface. Yes. She’s going to wait.

And while she waits, she’s going to savor the control that she has over this one small segment of her life. Just this one. Just one. That’s all she asks. That’s all she needs. That’s all she’s _got_.  

When it gets so bad that she’s waking up in the middle of the night, her stomach so empty that it hurts, she starts taking walks. The first time it happens she’s back before Jack has time to notice, the eeriness of the city too much for her to handle on her own, at least tonight. He’s awake when she returns, awake but sleep-addled, and she strokes his head and says she was in the bathroom, that’s all. He nods, his hair sticking damply to his forehead, his cheeks ruddy and flushed. She tells him to go back to sleep and he nods again, his eyes already fluttering shut. She lies back down and he pulls her hand to his lips for a kiss that he falls asleep before finishing. 

The next time it happens she pulls a skirt and blouse over her nightgown, laces up her shoes, and walks until her feet hurt. This time, Jack notices. This time, Jack’s awake when she returns, his eyes frantic, his breathing erratic. He’s pacing up and down the hallway, and she can tell that he’s nearly out of his mind with worry. For the first time in a long time, she feels guilt. She feels shame. She should have known that he’d wake up; perhaps some part of her did. Perhaps that’s why she left in the first place. She knows that he can’t sleep alone at night, not even for a few hours. She knows that. Or at least she did once. And now she knows it again. He crushes her in a hug as soon as she’s back, and it’s as if his panic and pain crystallize when he touches her, shocking them back to each other.

“You’re not eating,” he says. Not ‘Where were you.’ Not ‘What were you doing.’ But: _You’re not eating_. A statement, not a question.

 _He knows_ , she thinks. _He sees me._

“I’m not,” she agrees.

“At all?”

“Very little.”

He turns his head aside and closes his eyes, his face wretched. This is something he can’t understand. This is beyond the realm of his experience, and he doesn’t know what to do. He bites his lips, hard, and she knows he’s trying not to cry. But he does. Not loudly; they’re little tears, just little tears, soft and silent and welling up from the hole in his heart that she used to fill. But there’s not enough of her left to do that anymore, and so the tears spill, and spill, and she’s helpless, and she’s broken, and she wishes she’d known what this would do to him, because she could have worked harder, and she could have done better, she could have been more. She could have done that for him, she could have, she _knows_ she could have, and she didn’t. If only she’d wanted to, if only she’d bothered, if only she’d _tried_. But now it’s too late. Because now she’s failed. She’s failing at her job, she’s failing at her marriage, and she’s failing and falling and slipping and suffocating and she’s not anywhere near good enough. Not for any of it. Not one bit of it. And she’s certainly not good enough for him.

She wants to scream and cry and laugh because she’s finally realized that she’s good at only one thing now, just the one, and isn’t it just the way that her one good thing is exactly what’s tearing her apart.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“Me, too.”

A pause. A blink. A breath. And then: “I’m falling.”

“I’ll catch you.” 

“It’s not too late?”

“Never.”


End file.
